Need WordPress help, bitte

I’m trying to update my professional site in a way that allows for filtered searches of blog posts, like the example below from IDFA’s DocLab:

Filtered results would appear below as thumbnails for posts.

Specifically, I want to write summaries of conference papers highlighting key criteria and making it searchable, through a faceted search wherein I can drill down my results to papers on, for example, media spaces that include direct observation as a methodology and include touch screen interface prototypes deployed in public places and which mention user studies. That’s five different criteria.

I’m not a developer. My PHP skills are about as good as my German skills — that is, I can get a general sense of each sentence when I read it, but I can’t write it very well. So I think I could build something involving custom fields and custom taxonomies, but I just want a plugin that does it for me. I looked at the code under DocLab’s site and it seems that the filter is called “Carousel”. I looked it up under WP plugins and WP Carousel and Ajax Carousel both exist, but I couldn’t get them to work.